Microsoft Delivers Silverlight 5

Microsoft delivers Silverlight 5, a new version of the company's plug-in for developers for delivering applications for the Web, desktop and mobile devices.

Microsoft
has released Silverlight 5, the latest version of its tool for creating and
delivering rich Internet applications and media experiences on the Web.
Microsoft
made the less than 7MB Silverlight 5 plug-in available on Dec. 9. The software
can be downloaded here.
Microsoft delivered a release
candidate of Silverlight 5 on Sept. 1 and has been tweaking the technology
since then based on developer feedback.

"New
features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which
provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected
content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and
file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API
on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex
shaders and low-level 3D primitives."

Additional
Silverlight 5 new features include:

P/Invoke
support for calling native functions-enables existing native code to be run
directly from Silverlight

64
bit support

Remote
control and media command support

DataContextChanged
event

In-browser
trusted applications

PivotViewer
control

Power
awareness for media apps

Silverlight
5 performance improvements include reduced network latency by using a
background thread for networking, XAML parser improvements that speed up
startup and runtime performance, support for 64-bit operating systems, and
reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking.

Silverlight
tools improvements include Microsoft Visual Studio profiling support including
CPU, memory, thread contention and Visual Studio Team Test support.
Some observers
note that Silverlight 5 could be the last major release of the technology. However,
Microsoft has committed to support
Silverlight 5 until 2021.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.